I Can’t Possibly Make Any Money With This Post…

(Note: I experimented with typing this post in notepad and pasting it here. It seemed to have a few bugs with paragraph returns; I tried to fix the formatting as much as I could, but if I missed something I apologize)

Well, last week’s poll didn’t work. There seems to be a bug of some sort in the polling plug-in, because it kept closing fifteen minutes or so after I posted it, and nothing I would do would re-open it. So much for that idea.

I would love to be able to give you an update on the status of In Forgery Divided or The Merrimack Event, today. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can tell you that I haven’t already said. I’ve heard nothing new from editor, and have nothing I can post from my cover artist. So, both still have some time to go.

I’d still like to talk books, though, rather than go into a ramble. I recall, a while back, talking about a project I referred to as “This Book Cannot Make Any Money!” The idea was to, instead of writing another blog series on Self-Publishing, to walk people through the self-publishing process while I compiled and built a new book.

However, since I’ve already launched (or am about to launch) three series of novels already, I don’t intend to write anything new for it. Instead, I’m going to make it a compilation of a things I’ve written in the past that, for one reason or another, aren’t worth trying to sell… (at least not on their own).

So, in this first edition of the “Can’t Possibly Make Any Money!” blog series, I’ll assess what I’ve got in terms of content… and why I figured they wouldn’t make any money in the first place.

The first thing is a short story entitled “Voices.” Running only about 1,500-2,000 words, it’s not exactly large enough to self-publish on its own. I’m actually very proud of this story, but it’s a hard sell to literary magazines as it’s experimental\paranormal fiction (in more ways than one). The story was inspired by more than one English teacher saying, with absolute certitude, that “You should never write a novel from the first person omniscient perpective — it will never work.” So, of course, I set about to prove them wrong. I decided to give it a very ambiguous ending (you’re left to decide if the character REALLY was as omniscient as he claims). Years ago, I tried shopping this story around, but it was always rejected (though I recieved nice handwritten rejections from the likes of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly for it; sadly, my copy of that rejection was lost in a move, but in it the editor said I should make the ending less ambiguous… which went against what I was trying to do with the story in the first place. Ah, well).

The second item is an (untitled, but I’ll figure one out before publication) five page short story written entirely as an inside joke. This takes a touch of background to explain: I once joined a small writer’s group (The LCPS “Writer’s Circle”) sponsored by my local county’s public school system (why? Because it was the only writing-oriented thing I could find near me open to adults).

It was a… very interesting experience. There were five “enrolled” participants (including me) and the “instructor” (because it was operated by the Adult Education program of the public school system, an “instructor” was required; his being an “instructor” was a title of bureaucratic necessity, only). My fellow enrollees were as follows: A children’s book author who didn’t like children (she said so repeatedly and insisted she wasn’t joking), a woman writing a memoir of her battle against Lyme Disease (ugh), a blogger for “Voice of America” who never returned after our first meeting, and an octogenarian nurse on the verge of retirement whose only previous writing experience was writing reports for her job. All four of the other enrollees specifically said they hated science fiction and fantasy stories, like the ones I had hoped to share with the circle. Yay.

The instructor was fairly knowledgeable, however. He was a thriller\mystery novelist, and enjoyed reading in the science fiction and fantasy genre. He had appeared as a panelist at some conventions alongside the likes of Kevin J. Anderson, and for the most part knew what he was talking about (or at least, I agreed with many of his opinons on things). However, there was one small problem. We were all responsible for turning in five pages of writing every week for discussion, and INVARIABLY he had the same comment for everyone: “You need more details about [the scene\the character\the setting\the background].” If we made things as detailed as he wanted, though, it would take far more than five pages. So, as a prank, in the last week of the Writer’s Circle I wrote a five-page story that was so focused on these details that there was only room for two lines of actual story. Along the way, I used every synonym of the color red I could find to describe things.

He got the joke, and was amused… but his comment was “You spent all this time on the visual, but we never got any details on the sounds and smells!” *sigh*

It’s all an inside joke, and being an inside joke I don’t think it could make any money on its own. At least, not without some explanation. An explanation I could type up for the compilation without a problem.

And then there’s the third item on the list of things I plan to include in this compilation: Poetry. Which, well, every author I know of says you can’t make any money selling poetry… and honestly, these poems are probably not what people who LIKE writing poetry would try selling. And, honestly, I don’t like writing poetry all that much.

“Wait,” I know (some) of you want to say. “Why have you even written poems if you don’t like poetry?”

Well, uh… the poems I plan to include are partly the result of high school English-class poetry assignments. There are three High School poems (well, two high school poems and a tryptych of linked theme poems, two of which were added post-high school), some haiku I wrote for my days as a fanfic writer (there is a character in a particular anime I was a fan of who always tried to speak in haiku; I always hated writing his dialog), and maybe one or two other pieces I’ve forgotten about which I’ll find going through my old records. Not enough for a whole book full of poetry, but there is some.

And that’s it for COMPLETED work that might be included. However, nothing says I have to just use completed work — in the many years before I self-published, I wrote a whole heck of a lot. Much of it will never be published (in some cases, as with my fanfiction, it isn’t legal to; in other cases, I decided it just wasn’t good enough; with the upcoming release of “The Merrimack Event,” we’ll be through all of the work I thought was publishable in my past writing; In Forgery Divided is the first novel-length work I’ve written since I started self-publishing). Some of that body of work, however, includes material which might still be interesting clipped out of the original work. Keeping with the theme, though, it’s not likely you’d make any money as a writer trying to sell clippings of books you’ll never publish.

I’m not really sure what genre I’ll file a collection that contains paranormal, high fantasy, novel fragments, and poetry all together… but that’s another blog. (Note: Next week is Star Wars: The Force Awakens week. I’m probably not going to work on this blog at all, so my first follow-up on this post won’t be for at least two weeks)